GitHub user-content (raw.githubusercontent.com)

service Sat Jun 20 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) imageshostorigingithubrawuser-contentfallback

GitHub user-content (raw.githubusercontent.com)

Role

Tier 4 origin in the 4-tier image-host chain. The rare-use tier — invoked when:

• An asset is too large to commit alongside the post (> 25 MB Cloudflare Pages per-asset ceiling), OR
• An animated GIF would inflate the site repo's clone size, OR
• The PNG-must-stay-PNG case where Imgur would re-encode

Approach

Push the asset to a dedicated assets branch of any chirag127/oriz* repository. The branch is orphan (no shared history with main) so it doesn't bloat working clones — fetch only on explicit need. Reference the asset via:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/<user>/<repo>/<branch>/<path>

For example:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chirag127/blog-site/assets/2026/06/big-animation.gif

Free tier

• Free unlimited bandwidth via raw.githubusercontent.com for public repos (rate-limited per IP for abusive patterns; nowhere near family scale)
• Soft 100 MB ceiling per file in Git (above that → Git LFS, which has its own free 1 GB / month bandwidth — adequate for the rare case)
• 1 GB recommended ceiling per repo; the orphan-branch pattern lets us spread across repos as needed

Card / subscription required?

NO. Free GitHub account; same account that hosts the site repos. No card on file.

How it's used

1. Asset goes to <repo>/assets branch via git push --force (orphan branch is rebuild-able).
2. Stable raw URL committed to the post's frontmatter as image_tier_4:.
3. The treats it as the deepest fallback.
4. Optional: front the raw URL with jsDelivr's GitHub mirror (https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/<user>/<repo>@<branch>/<path>) for better edge cache; jsDelivr is already in our stack for npm packages.

Methods supported

Anything git push can do. Standard CI flow uses actions/checkout@v4 with ref: assets + commit-and-push.

Alternatives

• repo-hosted Tier 1 — when ≤ 25 MB
• ImgBB Tier 2 — when the asset shouldn't bloat git history
• Imgur Tier 3 — same as ImgBB except size + re-encode quirks

Swap cost

Low — branch + path naming convention is a pure git rename. URLs remain stable as long as the branch exists.

Why this is our pick

• Free unlimited; same account as the rest of the family
• Survives every other tier's outage (different operator from Cloudflare / ImgBB / Imgur)
• Permanent, content-addressable URLs (commit SHA pin available: raw.githubusercontent.com/<user>/<repo>/<sha>/<path>)
• No upload API; just git push — fits the markdown-in-repo authoring ergonomics

Caveats

• Default Content-Type from raw.githubusercontent.com is text/plain for unrecognized extensions — stick to standard image extensions (.png, .jpg, .gif, .webp, .avif).
• Browsers can hot-link, but Cache-Control is short — front with jsDelivr for CDN-caching when latency matters.
• Don't put the family's binary firmware / installers here; those go to GitHub Releases per the object-storage-split.

Cross-refs

• 4-tier image-host decision
• repo-hosted Tier 1
• ImgBB Tier 2
• Imgur Tier 3
• jsDelivr (npm + GitHub mirror CDN)
• Object-storage split — different domain (versioned binaries vs. images)
• No card-on-file rule
• Never-hit-quotas rule